Samsung 32GB Solid State Drive

No, I meant look for a SATA SSD, not specifically Samsung.. You won't find a PATA SSD.

completemadness - basically on a desktop system the difference would be completely negated if using 4 sticks of memory instead of 2, or if listening to music while typing a letter.

i think it just needs a lil time to muture... just out of curiosity how would you install xp to a sata notebook when they dont include a floppy drive now

Originally Posted by Woodstock
i think it just needs a lil time to muture... just out of curiosity how would you install xp to a sata notebook when they dont include a floppy drive now

You didnt need a floppy drive to install the driver for the SATA for the first Intel 875 based boards when SATA was brand new, the SATA controllers behaved like native IDE ones, like most do now.

Originally Posted by Woodstock
i think it just needs a lil time to muture... just out of curiosity how would you install xp to a sata notebook when they dont include a floppy drive now

You only need it for RAID drivers or obscure non-native SATA chipsets which I wouldn't recommend using anyway due to the performance loss and general ass-tardness of Windows when using them. You could always slipstream the drivers onto an XP CD, that way you can make it an unattended install as well! ;)

So how long 'til these become a must have for gaming rigs? :D

Not sure about gaming rigs, but I would love to have one of these (in 3.5" size) for my fileserver. These would be prefect for the drive thatholds the OS, and then the RAID array can go to sleep when not being used and so when not being accessed the server would consume almost no power, yet be able to pop back to life in the time it takes the RAID array to spin up.

My presumption was that solid-state hard drives would have a marked performance advantage over hard disk drives in development environments as a 'scratch/cache disk'. I suppose it would only hold true for low-capacity high-speed SATA variants in the near future?

Maybe it's coz my first language is not english, but i dont understand the bit on page 2 which says:

You could buy 8GB of memory for the same price of an SSD and still have change left over

How can you have change left over if it's the same price:?

Ah LOL! I see your point. I meant if you were spending the same money :)

Amon: that was the point of testing with very low memory: to really hammer the pagefile.

Nice drive, tho still room for improvement!!!

*Waits for the larger cheaper SATA-II versions :D

:( I like defragmenting

it'd be interesting to see this go up against a PCI (i think..) Ram Drive, especially if used as a cache/swapfile/scratch disk... would love to see the stats on that, and by the looks of it, i'm guessing the price wouldn't be too far off the mark also.

It is an ideal product for robust/mobile devices, but there's a long way to go before it has a home in my box... :P

sorry couldn't find a link to the ram drive on Bit-Tech... please correct me if i'm wrong... But this thing looks interesting! http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/gigabyte-iram/index.x?pg=1

I'm seeing Gigabyte tomorrow, want me to ask for one then?

EDIT: It's like 18 months old. I'll see if they have anything new.

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
I'm seeing Gigabyte tomorrow, want me to ask for one then?

EDIT: It's like 18 months old. I'll see if they have anything new.

Yeah it's old tech that never quite got started, a shame considering the potential such a device has... would love to find out if they had anything in the development pipeline, i find it hard to believe any company would abandon something like this with all the market buzz about robson & such...

Originally Posted by Tim S
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2007/07/21/samsung_32gb_solid_state_drive/1

It feels like we've had to forever use a rotating metal disk to store our data, but now finally solid state drives, or SSDs, are falling into the consumer fold. The question is: was it worth the wait?

:)

Okay, so after reading the article, you mentioned that pagefiles screw up the drives relatively quickly, so would you need a classic SATA drive just for the pagefile still? The performance is pretty good, but I don't see how you could use one of these in your laptop with a Windows OS on it because of the PF...or am I missing something?

I-Ram would be a perfect drive for the pagefile

Did they ever actually release the I-Ram2 ? - there is also the problem the I-Ram had a max memory limit of 4gb (i think), and the first revision was severly limited by the SATA interface
Im a bit dissapointed they never made, maybe a PCI-Ex1 solution - or somthing to that effect - the card had potential IMO - but they seemed to ditch it :(

SATA 1 yes, because getting a "harddrive" to be seen on a "non-harddrive" interface is difficult and costs more. It's still 4GB limited iirc.

Hells Bliss - As I said in the review, Samsung and other SSD makers use a bit-varying technique to average out where the data is put so you should have a comparable failure rate to a normal harddrive.

Originally Posted by completemadness
I-Ram would be a perfect drive for the pagefile

Did they ever actually release the I-Ram2 ? - there is also the problem the I-Ram had a max memory limit of 4gb (i think), and the first revision was severly limited by the SATA interface
Im a bit dissapointed they never made, maybe a PCI-Ex1 solution - or somthing to that effect - the card had potential IMO - but they seemed to ditch it :(

Iram will accept 7gb as long as the first stick is ECC registered. The other 3 than be normal 2gb sticks.

I saw this over at 2cpu.

£199 ex vat to buy from distribution!

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
SATA 1 yes, because getting a "harddrive" to be seen on a "non-harddrive" interface is difficult and costs more. It's still 4GB limited iirc.

fair enough, but a SATA2 version would be better ;)

Edit:
Actually, couldn't you just make the card you slot into the PCI-E slot have a hard disc controller ? and then you can do what you want on the other side of the controller

Originally Posted by completemadness
fair enough, but a SATA2 version would be better ;)

Edit:
Actually, couldn't you just make the card you slot into the PCI-E slot have a hard disc controller ? and then you can do what you want on the other side of the controller

Yes but it takes drivers whereas SATA is native. Drivers cost money etc :)

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Yes but it takes drivers whereas SATA is native. Drivers cost money etc :)

there are loads of HDD controllers out there, you would just need to be able to make your array of chips talk to the HDD controller

Originally Posted by konsta
I'm relatively certain that we've been using rotating glass disks to store our data for quite a long time now...

u sure? last HD i took apart i was able to bend the platter double before it broke

Originally Posted by BioSniper
Did I miss it or were there no power usage tests? That'd be nice to see imo specifically in our more power concious society :)

I read a review on these recently, if i recall correctly, the power usage was alot lower than a normal HDD, and as such the heat was lower too. But, at a price, in that although they are incredibly fast considering, they are, as of yet, only small, it won't last as long as a "standard" HDD, much like other flash devices. But, with the invention, and progression of "Phase-change" memory, we could be seeing in the next few years drives that are not only tiny in physical size, but massive in memory, with miniscule power requirements compared to our current hardware.

Originally Posted by simosaurus
u sure? last HD i took apart i was able to bend the platter double before it broke

Same here, only drive and i was bored, so i decided i wanted the disc out, couldn't find the screw bit i needed, so bent the hell out of it, certainly wasn't like any glass i've ever seen.